Former First Lady Nancy Reagan and Maj. Gen. Galen B. Jackman, Commanding General, US Army Military District of Washington, Washington, DC. follow the casket as it is placed on the presidential plane.
The casket of former President Ronald Reagan along with his family departed Naval Base Ventura County in Point Mugu on a presidential aircraft, enroute to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington DC. After lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda and a national and state funeral ceremonies, the casket will be flown back to the Presidential Library in Simi Valley, CA for burial on Friday.
Photo by Michael Maloney / San Francisco Chronicle

Photo: Michael Maloney

Former First Lady Nancy Reagan and Maj. Gen. Galen B. Jackman,...

Image 2 of 4

Former First Lady Nancy Reagan and Maj. Gen. Galen B. Jackman, Commanding General, US Army Military District of Washington, Washington, DC. wait as the casket is removed from the hearse.
The casket of former President Ronald Reagan along with his family departed Naval Base Ventura County in Point Mugu on a presidential aircraft, enroute to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington DC. After lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda and a national and state funeral ceremonies, the casket will be flown back to the Presidential Library in Simi Valley, CA for burial on Friday.
Photo by Michael Maloney / San Francisco Chronicle

Photo: Michael Maloney

Former First Lady Nancy Reagan and Maj. Gen. Galen B. Jackman,...

Image 3 of 4

The casket of former President Ronald Reagan is hoisted on to a lift in front of the presindential jet.
The casket of former President Ronald Reagan along with his family departed Naval Base Ventura County in Point Mugu on a presidential aircraft, enroute to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington DC. After lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda and a national and state funeral ceremonies, the casket will be flown back to the Presidential Library in Simi Valley, CA for burial on Friday.
Photo by Michael Maloney / San Francisco Chronicle

Photo: Michael Maloney

The casket of former President Ronald Reagan is hoisted on to a...

Image 4 of 4

A small crowd of military and their families wave goodbye as the presidential jet departs.
The casket of former President Ronald Reagan along with his family departed Naval Base Ventura County in Point Mugu on a presidential aircraft, enroute to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington DC. After lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda and a national and state funeral ceremonies, the casket will be flown back to the Presidential Library in Simi Valley, CA for burial on Friday.
Photo by Michael Maloney / San Francisco Chronicle

Praise for the late President Ronald Reagan's sunny resonance with the common man has been rasping all week on the ears of many activists and social workers who watched in vain as homelessness exploded under his watch --

and they hope the history books remember one thing:

Before Reagan, people sleeping in the street were so rare that, outside of skid rows, they were almost a curiosity. After eight years of Reaganomics - - and the slashes in low-income housing and social welfare programs that went along with it -- they were seemingly everywhere.

And America had a new household term: "The homeless."

"I don't think he was a bad guy, but I think he thought the private charity system could address homelessness. And he was wrong," said Michael Stoops, co-founder in 1981 of the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C., which he still helps direct. "He was a Robin Hood in reverse, who took from the poor and gave to the rich, and I think Americans have such short attention spans they forget this."

Reagan's supporters don't quite see it this way, of course, but his critics say the single most powerful thing Reagan did to create homelessness was to cut the budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development by three-quarters, from $32.2 billion in 1981 to $7.5 billion by 1988. The department was the main governmental supporter of subsidized housing for the poor and, combined with the administration's overhaul of tax codes to reduce incentives for private developers to create low-income homes, the nation took a hit to its stock of affordable housing from which it has yet to recover, they contend.

During the same period, the average family income of the poorest fifth of the American population dropped by 6.1 percent, and rose 11.1 percent for the top fifth, according to "Sleepwalking Through History," the best-selling assessment of the Reagan years by Haynes Johnson. The number of people living beneath the federal poverty line rose from 24.5 million in 1978 to 32.5 million in 1988.

And the number of homeless people went from something so little it wasn't even written about widely in the late 1970s to more than 2 million when Reagan left office.

"His HUD cuts were the main factor in creating homelessness, and we said that throughout the 1980s, but Reagan and his people never listened," said Stoops. "Reagan, very similar to Herbert Hoover, did not believe the federal government had a role in addressing poverty, so he resisted any legislation or programs that did that.

"Besides, how could he help the poor when he didn't even know who they were?"

Stoops and his close friend, the late Mitch Snyder -- the foremost leader in activism for homeless people in the 1980s -- slept on heating grates outside the White House in protest throughout 1986 and 1987 to push Reagan to fund programs for homeless people. When Reagan finally signed the Stewart McKinney Homeless Assistance Act in 1987, Stoops was sure he did so only because Congress had enough votes to override a veto, though the ex- president's supporters pointed to it as a positive sign that Reagan cared.

The gesture was more than counterweighed by Reagan's cuts in unemployment, disability, food stamp and family welfare programs, Stoops said -- not to mention the president's vilification of "welfare queens" as cheats in an effort to justify cuts.

Among Messman's first acts with his union was taking over empty houses to claim them for homeless people; oddly enough, one of the first he barricaded himself in turned out to be owned by Robin Orr, the former press secretary for first lady Nancy Reagan. He laughs about it today, but the laugh only goes so far.

"Once you cut housing programs that far, it's just about impossible to bring them back," said Messman, who now is homeless action coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee and editor of the Street Spirit homelessness newspaper in Oakland. "Reagan made homelessness permanent," he said.

Some experts contend, however, that Reagan was not entirely responsible for the crisis -- that homelessness emerged as an unfortunate consequence of the nation's shift toward personal responsibility after finding President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" policies wanting. It's not like Reagan wanted homelessness, they say.

"In the 1970s and early '80s, we said if we kept converting low-income housing into condos and co-ops, we would have a shortage of affordable housing and homeless people would be in the streets, and we got scoffed at -- but it was by both Democrats and Republicans," said Nan Roman, a longtime advocate for poverty relief who is president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. "The politics of individual administrations certainly contributed, but there's plenty of blame to go around through Congress and every president that followed Reagan."

Barry Bosworth, a former economist for President Jimmy Carter who is now at the Brookings Institution, even maintains that the man who ousted his former boss from the White House was well-intentioned in encouraging people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps instead of depending on their government.

"And in the end, if you were a taxpayer it was a pretty good deal," he said. "But if you were unemployed and homeless, it was not a good deal."

Marty Fleetwood, who co-founded the HomeBase homelessness resource and study center in San Francisco in 1986 and still runs it, said Reagan was "the turning point for the crisis. . . . but there's no sense in having negative sentiment toward him now."

"He was just the guy on watch at the time, he had that ideology, and he's left us with a legacy that we're still struggling with," she said. "So really, we need to look ahead instead of back." Then she chuckled.

"I'd like to imagine wherever he went, though, he's like some Dickens character bent over with a cane, saying, 'Oh my gosh, what did I do?' " Fleetwood said. "Would that just be divine justice? He wakes up in heaven and says, 'Oh no, I didn't mean that to happen. Can't we do something?' "